Even when Julia Gillard’s minority government unveils good policy it finds a way to make a political mess of it and destabilise her position as Prime Minister. That’s the upshot of Friday’s welcome moves by Immigration Minister Chris Bowen to fast track the arrival of a few hundred wealthy investors and to allow big mining projects to tap thousands of guest construction workers. The self-inflicted political wound is not the fault of bad policy, but the contradictions at the heart of Labor’s modern existence, its desperate attempts to remain in power and Ms Gillard’s inability to construct even a half-credible framework for making the most of Australia’s enormous opportunities.

Properly implemented, both the new business visa and the enterprise migration agreement would benefit all Australians. We are short of entrepreneurs with capital. And, as the capable Resource Minister Martin Ferguson and Special Minister of State Gary Gray point out, we face a massive shortage of ­professional, skilled and semi-skilled labour to construct our biggest-ever wave of resource projects. Increasing the supply of such entrepreneur-investors and workers will build a more prosperous Australian economy for all.

The political problem is that the first cab off the rank under the plan to bring in guest workers to help construct the $260 billion of committed resource projects turns out to be Gina Rinehart’s Roy Hill iron ore mine in the Pilbara. And that collides with Wayne Swan’s class envy demonising of Ms Rinehart and fellow mining entrepreneurs Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer. “Whose side are we on?’’ asked union boss Paul Howes after a Friday meeting with Ms Gillard about protecting manufacturing jobs. The PM was reportedly enraged that she was not aware of the results of the guest worker program, even though it was announced by her own government more than a year ago. And so followed the weekend’s hasty red tape backfill of an “Aussie jobs first’’ qualification.

What Labor can’t openly admit is that temporarily allowing in tens of thousands of foreign construction-related workers would make Australia more prosperous by helping to ease the labour bottlenecks that are making it harder for mining entrepreneurs such as Ms Rinehart to develop new projects. This would provide more, not fewer, job opportunities for Australians who already are free to move from a shrinking manufacturing sector to six-figure pay packets in the mining boom.

In fact, Australians would be better off if we took much greater advantage of cheap foreign labour by letting Chinese companies develop our isolated but resource-rich north with mines, dams, farms and even cities. Far from undercutting Australian workers, this would stimulate more good paying jobs in both the cities and the bush. The predictable outrage from the former White Australia policy unions would not ­represent the interests of Australians in general, but the interests of the unions in monopolising the supply of labour.

Labor cannot recognise or articulate this basic truth because it is locked into populist class warfare politics, paying off its union backers and trying to prevent its blue-collar base from revolting over the breaking of its no-carbon-tax promise. Ms Gillard is further marooned by rejecting even the notion of a “big Australia’’ growth economy.